The life and times of the Chief Dental Editor of Dental Products Report magazine and dentistry's "Technology Evangelist". Follow my thoughts and travels as I practice, write, lecture, tinker, and experiment with technology and technology in dentistry.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Questions abound & with this post, I'm looking for someone who can help solve these problems. Truth be known, these aren't really difficult problems to solve, they just require a desire to do so... And put solving the problems ahead of profits or pressure from investors.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating. We're now in the 3rd phase of digital dentistry. The first phase was the imaging phase where we started taking pictures and radiographs of our patients digitally. The second phase was the software phase where Programs allowed us to take the images from phase one and store them in a dental database along with all kinds of other dental data. The third phase is the 3D phase.

Unfortunately what we've done is now created a need for another software phase to tie all of this new data together. In the past couple of years I've integrated the Gendex CB-500 and the Cadent iTero into my practice. That means I now have data from 2 other sources that I need to backup outside of my Eaglesoft data. It also means I need other programs to open, read, and work with this data. We've come full circle again with not enough efficiency in containing our data.

Now information is like water and software is the bucket. The water is always going to overflow the bucket as long as the water continues to flow. What we need right now is a bigger bucket... one that can deal with all the data. We need a way to manage this and it's up to some bright software minds to solve the problem.

What will the next "complete data management system" look like? Questions abound...